Readers’ Views on Covid-19 in Prisons; Labor and Capitalism; Weeds and Flowers; Censorship; Politics of Snitching, and Voices from Behind Bars.
prisoners
Thoughts From the Outside: Capital is out of control
June 29, 2021Where I work among the homeless on the street, I see the infinite degradation experienced by those discarded by capitalist society and barely surviving on its margins. There were always those who live on the edge. Karl Marx was describing the lack of transparency in social relations: what appears to be a free decision to sell your labor is nothing of the kind. Yet people stay away from thinking about how all labor, even paid labor, is forced labor.
Readers’ Views: May-June 2021, part two
May 8, 2021Readers’ Views on: A Colombian View: What Is Socialism?; Trevor Wins!; Detroit School Fight; Suez Accident; What Prisoners Want; Voices From Behind Bars
Becoming new men
Since my release from the Security Housing Unit, it’s been an uphill battle to win the rights and freedoms that the prison bureaucrats don’t want us to have. Our objective has always been recreating liberation schools, but it’s a challenge even to get our own self-help groups.
Voices from the inside out: Prisons enable COVID
March 11, 2021A prisoner who got COVID-19 writes about how prisons have reprehensibly mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis, harming prisoners, line staff, their families, and the community at large.
Readers’ views, March-April 2021: part two
Readers’ Views on: The Objective Movement of History and Philosophy of Emancipation; Electric Cars are No Panacea; Pricing Nature and Lives; Racism and Anti-Racism in the Queer Community; COVID-19 in Prison.
Prisons mismanage COVID-19 crisis
February 7, 2021A prisoner who got COVID-19 writes about how prisons have reprehensibly mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis, harming prisoners, line staff, their families, and the community at large.
Readers’ views, January-February 2021: part two
January 31, 2021Readers’ Views on: What Is Philosophy? What Is Revolution?; Prisoners’ Quest for Self-Development; Voices from Behind Bars; Why Read N&L?
Double scourge of fascism and COVID-19 shakes the world: Vaccine rollout inflames global inequalities
January 30, 2021Vaccine rollout has been mired in poor planning, profit-centered thinking and indifference, with discrimination both within countries and against poor countries. Worldwide, a rat race ensued.
Women, incarceration and justice
January 29, 2021Participant report of a seminar on ongoing abuses of women in prison, women’s organizing against the abuses, and the limitations of reforms.
Maryland prisoners organize a union
November 24, 2020A prisoner’s expose of the North Branch Correctional Institution; and the demands of a new chapter of the Maryland Prison Labor Organization.
Soledad families say: “We Are Their Voice!”
August 29, 2020Voices of family members of prisoners and other supporters speaking out as they demonstrated in front of Soledad prison.
COVID-19 at San Quentin
Several hundred people, including many family members of prisoners at San Quentin Prison, Calif., demonstrated for the fifth time in the last three months to protest the state’s murder of prisoners by COVID-19.
Readers’ views, September-October 2020, part one
Readers’ Views takes up: Black revolt and racism; dialectics of liberation; school battles; election victories; history and freedom; class struggles; and fighting the Right wing.
Readers’ views: September-October 2020, part two
Readers’ Views takes up: Queer safety is a human right; fake green politics; women in India; women in the U.S.; shameless evictions; voices from behind bars.
Voices from the inside out: Black prison lives matter
August 28, 2020Mass incarceration, and disproportionate treatment by all aspects of the Prison Industrial Complex, is a cultural knee on the neck of the Black community as a whole.
Prison Truth
July 14, 2020Urszula Wislanka reviews the book “Prison Truth: The Story of the San Quentin News” by William J. Drummond. Prisoners’ humanity is not alone their individual transformation or “personal redemption” as a “human interest” story, as shown by the Pelican Bay hunger strikes.
Readers’ views: July-August 2020, part 2
July 1, 2020Readers’ views on Methology and liberation; LGBTQ liberation; Worker-student victory; Immigrants and the court; Black August; and Voices from behind bars.
Free Chanthon Bun! Stop ICE transfers!
Protesters in front of San Quentin prison demanded freedom for Chanthon Bun. Instead of honoring the board’s decision that he was suitable for parole, the California Department of Corrections and rehabilitation intends to transfer him to an ICE detention center.
Voices from the inside out: COVID-19 in prison
May 3, 2020Depending on the state and their prison system, healthcare inside is marginal during the best of times. Some prisons in Wisconsin are better than in most states, but that care is not consistent throughout Wisconsin’s facilities.
I. The failed pandemic response and the fetishism of the economy
April 30, 2020Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part I: Leaders around the world from China’s Xi Jinping to Donald Trump—have focused more on keeping production and the economy going than people’s health and lives.
Prisons = death
April 29, 2020Report on the #ClemencyCoast2Coast virtual town hall held on April 8, in which former prisoners took the floor to speak about the “death camps” that prisons have turned into in the COVID-19 pandemic and to demand early release.
No masks to prisoners
Incarcerated people are producing masks to protect people from COVID-19, but the vast majority of them are not receiving these masks for their own use.
Readers’ views, May-June 2020
Readers’ views on The dialectic in thought and in liberation; labor and pandemic; pandemic and ecology; pandemic and school; women’s liberation; and voices from behind bars.
Thoughts from the outside: A mind of one’s own vs. COVID-19
What is “visible” to the system is only “economic” activity: earning and spending money. We see that playing out in the debate over opening the economy vs. protecting lives. People’s lives, our humanity, are being pushed aside to continue production for production’s sake.
II. The true pandemic war
Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part II. The true pandemic war: A. The capitalists’ class war; B. Subjects of revolution fight back; and C. Pandemic class war reveals the social structure.
Prisoners make COVID-19 Masks but can’t use them
April 13, 2020Press release from the California Coalition for Women Prisoners reporting on the incarcerated women at the California Institution for Women, who are producing masks to protect people from COVID-19 but report that the vast majority of incarcerated people are not receiving these masks for their own use.
With COVID-19 prisons become ‘death camps’
Report on the #ClemencyCoast2Coast virtual town hall held on April 8, in which former prisoners took the floor to speak about the “death camps” that prisons have turned into in the midst COVID-19 pandemic and to demand early release.
Thoughts of COVID-19 in prison
April 1, 2020In prison here in Wisconsin, the guys are not as engaged as people in the community simply because of the nature of where we are. We are still in a relatively sterile environment which would change dramatically if someone comes in from the world and is a carrier. Healthcare inside is marginal during the best of times.
Free Lyris Wolfe!
March 17, 2020After almost three years in jail, Lyris Wolfe was finally released. There is video evidence that the offense was an accident.
Baridi speaks to Free the Caged Voices
Baridi, one of the signers of the 2012 “Agreement to End Hostilities,” talks about the contradictions of the U.S. prison system.
Prison slave labor
Federal prisoner slave labor is producing comic books and other materials for the U.S. market. UNICOR corporation pays federal prisoners from 23¢ to $1.15 per hour, often working 15½-hour shifts, with unpaid lunch and dinner times, but no other breaks.
Voices from the inside out: On becoming human
March 11, 2020Faruq reflects on the question of social interaction in the modern capitalist world, seen from the point of view of someone who has spent several years in prison.
Readers’ views, March-April 2020: Part two
March 6, 2020Readers’ views on philosophy and the retrogressive changed world; pandemics and social control; mental illness and criminal ‘justice’; culture’s bizarre normal; and voices from behind bars.
Oakland meeting: Revolutionary journalism and Prisoner Human Rights Movement
February 11, 2020Sunday Feb. 16th, 6:30PM 6501 Telegraph, Oakland
We’ll explore the contrast between the practice of revolutionary journalism shaped by freedom as human essence and freedom as a “special privilege” in press freedom under censorship.
Discussion led by: Urszula Wislanka, long-time prisoner-activist, writer/editor for The Fire Inside, publication of California Coalition for Women Prisoners, and journalist for News & Letters.
Faruq, Marxist-Humanist writer-participant in the 2011-2013 hunger strikes at Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit.
Readers’ Views, January-February 2020, Part Two
January 22, 2020Readers’ Views on Philosophy and Revolution; disorder is the order; anti-Semitism; Black August, and voices from behind bars.
Free Sitawa Jamaa
January 21, 2020It is more important than ever to free Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, one of the four main representatives in the historic 2011-13 hunger strikes initiated in Pelican Bay prison’s Security Housing Unit, after his stroke.
Voices from the inside out: A ‘free world’ view
Former prisoner Faruq writes of how in prison he “figured out how to become truly myself” and how that is manifested while on parole.
Rebuilding our lives
November 17, 2019A report on meeting on a re-entry program for women rebuilding their lives after prison.
A different me from 20 years ago
A prisoner thinks through how she will approach life after prison.
Voices from the inside out: Generations in jail
Robert Taliaferro takes up the high rate of incarceration in the U.S., focused on its effects on children whose parents are in prison.
Readers’ Views, November-December 2019, Part Two
Readers’ Views on permanent revolution and the dialectic, and voices from behind bars
Essay: Black August, from 1971 to 2011-13
In the spirit of Black August Memorial, Faruq talks about the conditions of Black prisoners, the need to break race divisions between them and white prisoners, and the quest for the Idea of Freedom.
Free Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa!
November 10, 2019It is more important than ever to free Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, one of the four main representatives in the historic 2011-13 hunger strikes initiated in Pelican Bay prison’s Security Housing Unit, from prison as in early November 2019 he suffered a stroke.
Creating homes for ex-prisoners
September 1, 2019Excerpts from a talk by Terah Lawyer, ex-prisoner and coordinator of the Homecoming Project for Impact Justice that finds private homes for prisoners on probation.
UNICOR slave labor
Prisoner Pepke exposes the use and exploitation of prisoners’ labor by the UNICOR company.
Readers’ Views, September-October 2019, Part 2
Readers’ Views on What is socialism?; Surviving the prison system; Women fight back; and Exploiting prisoners
Readers’ Views, September-October 2019, Part 1
Readers’ Views on: Youth revolt, from China to climate strikes; Gunning for immigrants; Circling the abyss; Queer Notes; A prisoner responds; 1619 and today; Reading ‘N & L’; Elena Grigorieva; and Deborah Morris
Prison & Cesar Chavez
Prisoner Trent brings memories of the United Farm Workers’ leader Cesar Chavez in connection with the Pelican Bay hunger strike.
Voices from the inside out: Promises broken
August 31, 2019A prisoner’s critique of Wisconsin’s Governor Tony Evers’s broken promise of reducing prison population in the state to half.